A Service Science Startup

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A Service Science Startup scope, opportunities
and challenges

• Richard Taylorconcinnitas

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?
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What do we do?

• Bring sophisticated, multi-disciplinary skills to
  service analysis, design and management
• Provide organisations with frameworks that enable
  them to value, develop and implement technologies
  that enable effective service implementation and
  management
• Save money, improve the user experience and
  maximise the lifetime value of service systems
• Work with a mixture of public and private sector
  organisations in Europe and the US
• Enjoy ourselves.

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A quick look at the business environment from a
small business perspective

• January 2009
• Factory gloom deepens
• Re-possessions 'almost double'
• Unemployment hits 1.92m
• Microsoft to cut up to 5,000 jobs
• - exchange rate falls to 1.37 from 2 in July
  2008
• April 2009
• Executive leaks point at 15Bn of public sector
  savings
• Pressure on public spending, consumer indulgence,
  commercial investment (and not the right type)
• To quote my manager when I left Hewlett-Packard
  its a bummer of a time to do a startup
• Dont believe it!

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In days of plenty

• business, government and consumer investment
  decisions becomes sloppy
• taking risks is easier not because they are
  better understood, but because confidence and
  perception drive decisions
• a bad or inappropriate technology will always be
  a bad or inappropriate technology, BUT
• many offerings, hardware, software, services are
  misaligned or badly tuned
• economic good times provide a longer window to
  reconstruct the offering than might otherwise be
  the case

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The conclusion

• getting alignment right is always important,
  getting it right first time or at least
  enabling very rapid tuning, is essential when
  money is tight and your markets are cautious
• the question is how do you go about doing this,
  what do you align to, how do you assess the value
  of flexibility?
• "Prediction is very difficult, especially about
  the future.
• Niels Bohr

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A perspective on technology and value a tale of
two offerings
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Value chain, value significance
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Servitization, servitization, servitization
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There is just one thing wrong with the iceberg
analogy its the wrong way up
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but hey services?
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The most complex, most interesting, most
difficult systems humans have ever built
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So what does this mean to you as developer,
manufacturer, supplier, user, commissioner or
victim?
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Cycles of systems

• the components within your service system
  operate at different frequencies
• you need to plan your measurement and control
  strategy based on assumptions about these
• and then go and correct them as they change
  (they will)

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So how can this work the scientific approach
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Your systems are Control Systems
how fast do we try to change things?
what do we control?
what do we measure?
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How do we approach the issue of service analysis,
design and management?

• models
• people
• performance
• availability
• resources
• dynamics
• and lots of them the day of the monolithic be
  all to all people model is long since dead
• prototypes real prototypes, the ones that get
  thrown away at the end of an assessment
• stakeholder integration service failures are
  as often a failure of context as they are of the
  the service or supporting technologies
• communications and documentation the scenario
  planning paradox

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Our processes
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So what has this done to our business

• A business plans typically survives up to (but
  not necessarily though) contact with the real
  world
• Our business
• High value consulting on service strategy,
  structure, management and measurement
• Contractual Research and Development for large
  systems and services companies
• Education
• IP and tool development.

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And the challenges?

• Spending to save great in principle, but
  getting any organisation to synchronise money and
  mouth is a challenge
• Maintaining and managing contacts with the
  academic community
• Managing a sales pipeline ensuring business
  will be there in 18 months time as current
  projects complete and matching that to
  recruitment and investment
• Recruitment, recruitment, recruitment.

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• To find out moreRichard Taylorconcinnitas130
  Aztec, Aztec WestBristol BS32 4UB44 (0) 75 90
  12 25 86richard.taylor_at_concinnitas.co.ukwww.conc
  innitas.co.uk